Backup and recovery software products are crucial for enterprise level network clients. Customers rely on backup systems to efficiently back up and recover data in the event of user error, data loss, system outages, hardware failure, or other catastrophic events to allow business applications to remain in service or quickly come back up to service after an outage. Data protection and comprehensive backup and disaster recovery procedures become even more important as enterprise level networks grow and support mission critical applications and data for customers.
As virtualization technology advances, many large scale networks are utilizing greater amounts of virtual machines (VMs). For example, Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) are quickly becoming common as enterprises look to cost-effectively increase their resources by converting their physical datacenters to a virtual infrastructure. In a software-defined data center, all elements of the infrastructure, from networking, storage, CPU and security are virtualized and delivered as a service in an attempt to achieve IT (information technology) as a service. SDDCs are virtual datacenters (vCenters) that may include hundreds to thousands of virtual machines. Such infrastructure requires advanced methods of data protection to provide maximum value for the investment and provide adequate failover control for mission critical data. It is also important that backup operations be intelligent enough to conform to the requirements of the service level agreements (SLA) that set the terms of cloud computing arrangements. SLAs commonly include terms that address performance measurements, problem management, customer duties, warranties, disaster recovery, and other terms. In the shared infrastructure environment of cloud computing, SLAs focus on characteristics of the data center and the network to support end-to-end SLAs.
Current methods of performing backup operations in virtual centers are generally not sufficiently advanced enough to avoid potential issues related to data security and disaster recovery. One current method of backing up virtual centers is to use a manual schedule for a few VMs mapped to a backup policy. Though this method is better than legacy backup and replication techniques, it is still not sufficiently competent, and often fails to conform to the terms of aggressive SLA clauses with respect to backup performance and security. Present backup methods also still depend heavily on backup or system administrators and their personal experience to configure and schedule the backup policies. This is clearly not the most efficient way to backup entire virtual datacenters. Other shortcomings associated with present backup methods for virtual data centers includes sub-optimal use of storage and other resources through legacy methods of backup that are dictated by schedules that are hard coded in the system, and a lack of assurance that critical data is always backed up in a timely manner.
What is needed therefore, is a system that dynamically backs up virtual datacenters in a dynamic process that optimizes storage and resource usage, and that backs up data based on user customized criteria as opposed to a hardcoded schedule.
What is further needed is a system that provides robust security mechanisms to protect critical data, and that meets aggressive backup/restore timelines and SLA terms.